In praise of ... red rubber bands

Posy Simmonds uses them to keep her paint brushes tidy. Other people hobble chopsticks together with them. Chunky and robust, they are perfect for kitchen use, invaluable for half-empty bags of coffee or sugar and trash bags that some idle sloth has overfilled. Gather enough and they can be turned into high-velocity rubber balls, although the ensuing crater suggested it was a mistake to drop one from an airplane to see how high it would bounce. And for the natural Scrooge, they can even look remarkably like a charity wristband. But above all, they are free. In the two years or so since the Post Office started using red rubber bands (about 250m a year) to gather sorted mail, optimistically believing it would enable posties to spot them and pick them up when one was accidentally dropped, probably 3m have been casually discarded on doorsteps and pavements in towns and villages across the United Kingdom. Even normally quite sane people find it hard to resist gathering this year-round harvest, the by-product of a society still civilised enough to deliver post to our front doors (even if it is less and less often at a convenient moment, like before breakfast). Like the almost-defunct 35mm film canister, it is easy to find oneself with so many that the challenge becomes finding a use for something for which usefulness is a defining characteristic. The high-visibility rubber band may have failed in its primary purpose, but the law of unintended consequences has had an unusually benign outcome.